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Explaining Brute Facts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Eric Barnes
Eric Barnes*
Affiliation:
Southern Methodist University
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Extract

I hope to convince you that one way of testing the mettle of a theory of scientific explanation is to inquire what that theory entails about the status of brute facts. In what follows I briefly consider the nature of brute facts, and then survey several contemporary accounts of explanation vis a vis this subject. These include the Friedman-Kitcher theory of explanatory unification (Friedman (1974), Kitcher (1981) and (1989)), Peter Lipton's (1991) account of the nature of explanatory loveliness, and the causal theory of event explanation developed by Paul Humphreys in his (1989). It is my view that each of these accounts of explanation entails (or at least lends itself to) a false view about the nature of brute facts: according to each account, a brute fact is unexplainable and thus represents a scientific ‘mystery’, where by this expression I mean some manner of a lack of scientific understanding.

Type
Part II. Explanation, Induction, and Linguistic Representation
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 60 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

Barnes, E. (1992a), “Explanatory Unification and Scientific Understanding”, in Hull, D., Forbes, M., and Okruhlik, K. (eds.) PSA 1992, Vol. I, 3–12.Google Scholar
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